Adobe to Offer Parole to Jailed eBooks

Adobe plans to release an update to its Digital Editions e-book reader software in the near future that will solve the problem of e-books being locked to a single PC  or in some cases, vanishing after a system crash or format.

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Adobe plans to release an update to its Digital Editions e-book reader software that will solve the problem of e-books being locked to a single PC  or in some cases, vanishing after a system crash or format.

According to a source close to the company, Digital Editions 1.5 will be released in beta format sometime in the next couple of months, and a final version will be released in 2008. The new software will include a "Named Activation" feature, allowing users to back up and shift their content onto other computers and portable devices, if the publisher allows it.

Ironically, Adobe executives criticized the closed nature of the rival Amazon Kindle e-book platform  even as their own Digital Editions customers are currently locked into a single PC. An Adobe spokesman also noted that the company is a partner of Sony and its existing Sony Reader, which can display .PDF files.

"Right now the Kindle is a closed platform, as you're aware," said Bill McCoy, general manager of the ePublishing business at Adobe, in an interview. "It's a fixed device; content can't be read on any other device, such as an iPhone. It's a closed ecosystem, even more so than iTunes and the iPod."

However, the users of the current Adobe Digital Editions software aren't faring much better. According to Adobe customers complaining on the company's Digital Editions support forum, the DE users were unable to shift content from PC to PC, and were also unable to view content that they had purchased if the Internet connection failed. In some cases, the e-books vanished altogether if the PC they resided on crashed, as the only Adobe-provided provision for backing up the e-books will come in Digital Editions 1.5.

Although customers are blaming Adobe for the loss of their content, McCoy also pointed out that some e-book services are also failing to automatically restore lost content, as Apple's iTunes service does. In part, that may be because e-book sales are just a tiny fraction of printed book sales; the Association of American Publishers estimates that less than 1 percent of 2005 sales were e-books, and a report in The Wall Street Journal suggested that e-book sales account for $25 million a year at most.

However, that won't be a consolation to the estimated 750,000 people who have downloaded the Digital Editions software since its launch in June. McCoy said he believed that the DE software was one of Adobe's most successful launches ever; anecdotally, he said he believed that more people had downloaded Digital Edition 1.0 than any other 1.0 release in the company's history.

Customers aren't happy

Some customers, however, saw the DE software in a different light. "I had a system crash two years ago and after restoring 60 e-books in PDF format I was unable to get them authorized again," Harrie Frericks posted in August, before Amazon launched its Kindle service. "I contacted both Amazon and Adobe but both were unable to help. In fact, Adobe never replied to my emails. Amazon seems not to sell e-books any more and they are unable to give me a re-download."

"All this DRM is a technical mystery to me," Frericks added. "I found out that when I disconnected my PC from the Internet, Digital Editions was unable to authorize books I had just purchased. Apparently some on-line checking takes place, but it's all a mystery to me. I'm very sad about this. I think digital ebooks are a great medium, but it seems it's getting killed by a poorly designed system."

As Frericks and others discovered, however, some publishers like Amazon simply put their e-book programs on hold, leaving even those customers with receipts out of luck. Problems were still being reported as late as Thursday, when Terry Alkayali posted a similar complaint.

"I wish I had known about Digital Editions wiping out my ebook library. Just got off the phone to customer service and they tell me to trash the app and reload," Alkayali wrote. "I should be fine. I wasn't. Called again, same thing. Free apps get no support. Try a hardware tech. Now I see others with the same problem. How much money did you lose? Why are there no solutions after 4 months? I want my books back or ???"

Adobe executives admitted that they had not anticipated that customers would want to back up their e-books. "We simply underestimated what percentage of users needed that feature and how much they depended on it," McCoy said. He said that the 1.5 release would be "very soon".

Part of the problem, according to McCoy, is that Adobe is now on version 8.11 of its Adobe Reader software, which shares the ability to read PDFs with Digital Editions. The Digital Editions software also weighs in at 22.3 Mbytes, while the lighter Digital Editions is under 3 Mbytes for the Windows version. The company had to determine the "critical set of functionality," he said. "Expectations were high," McCoy said of customers. "And the expectations of [a] version 8.0 [release] are higher than version 1.0."

In addition, McCoy said that Adobe had taken the unusual step of forcing its development team to assist with support requests, in part to improve the product.

To restore a lost e-book, in some cases users can go back to the e-book provider and move the e-book manually. A user could check an e-book out from a library, check it back in again, and then check out the book a second time from another PC, McCoy said.

How the new DRM scheme will work

"Some users have eBooks and other digital publications on their computers that have been licensed with Acrobat, Reader or Digital Editions using 'Easy Activation,' Ric Wright, an Adobe support staffer, wrote on the company's DE forums on Oct. 31. "These items cannot be moved to a new computer, essentially becoming locked on a particular machine. To solve this problem, Adobe Digital Editions 1.5 will convert items to a 'Named Activation' license, enabling them to be backed up, copied and read on other computers. All items subsequently downloaded with Digital Editions 1.5 will be licensed using Named Activation. This change will also enable a new breed of mobile devices designed to be used with Digital Editions. However, note that your content will NOT be portable if the content distributor has specified a more restrictive setting, in which case you will need to re-acquire the content directly from them."

Named Activation will lock e-books to an "Adobe ID," a password that a user will be asked to create if he does not already own it. The DE software will then look for copies of e-books on the computer and reassign them to the DE 1.5 software and the Adobe ID. The e-books will then be allowed to other devices, where users will have to enter the Adobe ID to unlock them. Wright warned, however, that older e-books locked with "Easy Activation" will have to be unlocked and relocked with Named Activation on the original PC.

But McCoy also had little sympathy for those customers who did "dumb things," like reinstall Windows.

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"To be clear, Adobe never made a commitment to protect users from doing dumb things like a hard drive wiped of content," McCoy said. "Our view is that's unfortunate, but that's not Adobe's fault. There are always users who don't like DRM and blame someone else for it. It's a class of situation that's unfortunate for users but ultimately Adobe is not responsible for."

Adobe, McCoy said, was in a "tough spot" with the need to protect the rights of publishers as well as the rights of consumers to own their content. "We're not aware of any legitimate cases that 1.5 won't fix," he said.

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